Time Automaton A visual mechanism for temporal querying

Abstract

Visual querying mechanisms are normally comfortable and accessible mechanisms. However, they generally do not provide the means for formulating a large set of different types of temporal interrogations. In this paper we propose the Time Automaton, a highly flexible visual language, capable of formulating many types of temporal queries. Time Automaton's logic is innovative and unlike available visual mechanisms it is not based on the direct conversion of visual queries into a predefined set of commands of a textual querying language, like for example, SQL.